Coburg, Bavaria, 2004. The Crytek team was trickling into work in the early hours of the morning when state troopers kicked down the door. The studio had recently completed development on Far Cry, but the polizei (armed with Heckler & Koch sub-machine guns) weren’t exactly there to play Capture the Flag. At a nearby Crytek residence, a programmer emerged from the shower to find armed troopers in his room. He was ordered to lay on the floor, naked, a gun to his head.
Developer Tim Partlett, who vented his frustration about the event in an online forum, was herded into the studio’s Mo-Cap offices by dozens of armed guards and questioned under the kind of military threat that would make Jack Bauer shit his pants. Supposedly, this heavy-handedness was in response to an allegation by a former employee that Crytek had installed illegal software.
